Felling Native Forests, Defending Indigenous Sovereignty

My project weaves environmental, Native, and labor history together to tell the story of 19th-century industrialization in northern Maine. More specifically, I study the relationships between Penobscot people, forests, and Penobscot River Watershed (PRW) logging companies between 1820 and 1914. I show that even though lumbering companies harvested thousands of trees per year from Penobscot lands, Penobscot people harnessed industrialization to defend their land and sovereignty. My research challenges oversimplified narratives that imply industrialization produced unidirectional environmental degradation and economic marginalization of oppressed people.

My project contains four chapters. The first chapter will discuss the histories of Native people, agrarian settlers, and the colonial state in the PRW before 1820 (when lumbering began industrializing and Maine became a state). This introductory section will describe the Penobscot subsistence and agrarian settler economies which preceded the advent of industrial logging, establishing how Native people used and cared for forests and how non-Native people farmed and felled trees before industrialization. By emphasizing non-Native farmers’ habit of clearing hardwood forests and highlighting Penobscot use of hardwood trees like Paper Birch and Brown Ash, this section will argue that settler agriculture was a serious threat to Penobscot livelihoods even though it only affected a relatively small area of the PRW.

The second and third chapters will analyze Penobscot labor between 1820 and 1882 (the lumbering industry’s peak), with particular attention to Penobscot river drivers and basket makers. These chapters will argue that in comparison to the deforesting tendencies of settler farmers, the 19th-century lumbering industry’s narrow interest in softwood trees like pine and spruce and need for workers made its inception a welcome development to Penobscot people. Men who worked as river drivers received competitive wages, and women basket-weavers adjusted their seasonal economic patterns to benefit from the lumbering industry’s seasonal structure.

The fourth chapter will chronicle the emergence of pulp and paper production in the PRW between 1882 and 1914 (when the industry’s structure changed in response to the outbreak of World War One). This section will draw contrasts between the harvesting and labor practices of industrial lumbering and industrial pulp and paper companies. I argue that in comparison to industrial lumbering, the pulp and paper industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was far more destructive to the Penobscot people, forests, and economy due to its preference for clearcutting forests containing birch and ash trees and its abandonment of river-driving in favor of less labor-intensive transportation technologies.

I plan to use a combination of maps, ecological diagrams, archival scans, and small amounts of text to illustrate my work on a poster. During a GIS course last summer, I made maps showing Penobscot economic activity: river driving, basket sales, and hunting. I will place these maps alongside diagrams illustrating the habitats for important trees in this history. In conjunction with scans of corporate records and other archival documents, this poster will paint an image of the human and non-human PRW.